I decided to make some mockups myself, because I think that the BYOND site deserves to look super awesome. Tom, I understand that you and Lummox JR have been working hard on the forums, but I feel like they could be so much better than they are now. Honestly, I just think they still look rather bland, even with the new colors. It makes me feel as though I am looking at a table designed in Microsoft Excel, not a forum. I appreciate your work Aaiko, but I don't think you have taken it far enough. The colors, however unrefined, have been a good start though. I think the biggest issue with the forums is not the color scheme, but the way in which it is laid out. There needs to be a certain flow to the colors, and hopefully I have achieved that in my mockups.

Changes:

One of the first things you will notice about the mockups is that I have replaced the dull orange color in the headers with a bright and glossy orange bar. I think that would make the forums look much more lively than they do now.

Another important change is the color of the grey shading that makes up the background of most of the text in the forums. After examining the shades more closely, I noticed that they were too close to cyan, rather than blue, which didn't go with the orange or match the BYOND color scheme at all, so I brought them closer to blue.

I added headers to show the titles of each subforum and new post just for completeness. I also made the sub-headers into silver colored bars, to blend in with the background color and be less distracting, while still making sure that they aren`t flat.

As for the post replies, I have changed all orange bars, except the header to that same silvery style, that way everything flows together nicely, and doesn't strain your eyes to read.

Another change is a small one that made a big difference. I added some border along the left and top sides of most boxes, which effectively made them appear to pop up out of the page, which was about all it took to do away with the flat spreadsheet look.

Now with the games section, I colored all of the game boxes to a shade of grayish blue, to match the style of most other boxes on the site. I think that is also easier on the eyes and it allowed me to give them more of an outline, to stand out a bit more. Also, I think the "Sort by" buttons should be above the "Games" title, because it just looks more jumbled and disorganized when they are under the title.

Another minor change was that white box with links right under the BYOND logo (Get Started - Register - Login). I changed that to the silvery box style, because I think it really takes a lot away from the logo, and I`m sure you wouldn't want that!

In case you are wondering, I made these by hand, editing them as images, so no real coding was involved. Half the time I was editing on the pixel level, so these were pretty hard to make!
Honestly, I'm not familiar with CSS stylesheets, so I don't really know how hard this would be to implement. I`m sure it`s not impossible though.

Why all of the down votes? I would like to at least know what you don't like about the mockups. Is it because you don't like the way they look, or just don't think it is necessary to change the style? It would also help to know what you like about them.

If the layout needs to be changed, then that's a whole other problem. I was simply trying to address the issue with the colors and the design.

That said, I really don't like looking at the alternating stripes of orange and cyan in the posts. I find it rather painful on the eyes.

In case a lot of the down votes were from the bright orange headers, I tried switching out the hues. In this mockup, the orange headers are now blue with white text, and the blue-grey colors were shifted to an orange-grey.